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This paper aims to incorporate Greimassian semiotics of passions in current cognitive science. Concepts such as passional codes, the canonical passional schema, and other central Greimassian notions in the domain of passions are mapped against ideas such as frames and layers of meaning within cognitive science. By integrating the two fields artificially kept apart, the authors endeavour to show how the resulting synergy could shed new light on the study of passions.

This paper is a response to Sanem Soyarslan’s objections to my reading of Spinoza’s free person (homo liber). She argues that on my interpretation the free person, unlike the wise person (vir sapiens), while subject to passive affects, does not experience bondage to the passions; and so only the latter, but not the former, can serve as a viable “model of human nature.” I argue that, in fact, the free person and the wise person are, for Spinoza, one and the same indiviual, and thus constitute a single ideal model that we can more or less closely approximate.

This paper provides a reception history of Book Two of the Treatise-Of the passions-as well as an attempt to reconcile Hume's ambitions to systematicity in Book Two with the distracted and distracting nature of the text. We currently have, I think, a good sense of the philosophical importance of Book Two within Hume's science of human nature. Yet we have not made much progress on understanding Book Two on its own terms, and especially why Book Two so often seems on the verge of falling into an explanatory heap. I aim to rectify this situation by giving a reading of Book Two that makes sense of the philosophical importance of Hume's system of the passions, yet also explains why he encounters so many difficulties in setting out his system; such that he is often forced to stretch his explanations to the very edge of the credible. I contend that Hume's system of the passions is best viewed as an unstable explanatory compound, one that progressively dissolves as Hume's explanatory intentions become increasingly ambitious.

While the more frequent historiographic tendency is to associate the early modern occurrences of “self-love” in English texts with the Augustinian template (the “infected love” of a postlapsarian “wicked will”), this paper aims to highlight several instances of a different usage. The seventeenth-century writings on the passions it will investigate work with a notion of “self-love” which only formally carries Augustinian echoes but whose content is rather in tune with notions belonging to a Stoic-inspired scenario of a cure of the soul (resistance to cure, failure of self-examination, narrowness of self – to be gradually shed off by means of a discipline of judgment, self and emotions). As such, they are interesting cases of a typical early modern phenomenon of eclectic discourse formation and mutual contamination of traditions of thought, and testify to a generally neglected early modern concern with a doctrine and a practice of the “cure of the soul” which typically aims to graft Christian theology onto ancient philosophy.

In this paper, I address two widespread misconceptions about Descartes’s theory of love. Descartes defines love as a passion that ‘incites [the soul] to join in volition to the objects that appear to be suitable to it’ (AT XI: 387/Voss: 62). Several commentators assume joining in volition is an act of judgment, since forming judgments is the primary function of the will in the Meditations. However, I argue joining in volition is an act of imagining a whole one forms with an object of love. I draw on Descartes’s account of volition in The Passions of the Soul to show forming images in one’s mind qualifies as a volition, on his view. Second, commentators often assume joining in volition is an essential part of love. However, I argue joining in volition is not an essential part of love because love is not identical to joining in volition, and love does not necessitate the soul to join in volition.

This article presents the semiotic analysis of Giedrė Kazlauskaitė poem Venecijietiška kaukė… The research aims to delve into the structures of the poetic world of Giedrė Kazlauskaitė, which is achieved through executing a detailed semiotic analysis of one poem. Accordingly, this paper follows the semiotic framework of the analytical trajectory, which encompasses the analysis through the means of discursive, narrative, and logical semantic levels. In addition, the study includes Yuri Lotman’s discourse of the concept of the mirror in cultural semiotics. Findings derived from the semiotic analysis suggest that the figures of the mask and the mirror become central representations at the discursive level of the poem, as they exist in a paratopic space - the make-up room. The mask and the mirror appear in Kazlauskaitė’s poetry as an essential tool for shaping one’s own identity. Moreover, the analysis of the poem is supplemented with the expression of the passions of anger and jealousy. Such approach highlights two different forms of anger: destruction arising from jealousy and a creative act. These forms suggest that the passion of anger drives the subject to the act of doing. Furthermore, in this poem, the figure of the poet is not presented as calm or accommodating, but rather as angry and unafraid to show contempt.

The Gothic movement in English literature that started in the eighteenth century thrived on the cult of sentimentalism, sensibility and strong emotions, especially that of fear. Awakening an intensity of consciousness and a new dimension of reality, Gothic established a new relation between the Self and the world. Women novelists and the Gothic have a significant relationship since the genre was at hand for the purpose of expressing the dormant fantasies, forbidden desires and repressed passions, unthinkable to reveal otherwise for the women of the eighteenth and nineteenth century society. Boundaries of the Self and the desire to escape are the two paradoxical facets in Female Gothic during this period. Indeed, a recurring female voice of discontent and suffering amidst confinement and persecution echoes time and again in women's Gothic fiction throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The Self in chains craving for liberty, driven by an urge for transcendence is a common trope in Romanticism; when it comes to women and their predicament, it gains a special significance, since society denied them a notion of authentic Selfhood. The heyday of Gothic romance was also a time when women's place in society was becoming a matter of increasing debate and a number of writers sought to clarify the issue. Most of these attempts to define women's position were also attempts to confine her in a separate sphere bound by the duties of home and to ensure her participation in an ideology that limited the exercise of her physical, intellectual and emotional faculties. In women's writings, this discontent continuously circles around the theme of the boundary of the Self. The genre of the Gothic gives dramatic form to female anxiety of Self.Gothic romance offers a vivid expression of psychological, religious, epistemological and social anxieties that resolve themselves into a concern about the boundaries of the Self. As two of the most intensely passionate voices in English literature, both Emily and Charlotte Bronte express this anxiety in individual ways through their works. My paper will explore the portrayal of the paradoxical theme of constraints and emancipation through the nature and actions of the female protagonists in Wuthering Heights and Villette.

By analyzing interacting processes in Diderot’s posthumous novel The Nun, the aim of this paper is to show that passions stimulate so often actions and thus provoke Actants’ narrative programs. The Actants in The Nun (Suzanne, the main character, but also the Superiors) merely take action; they react in response to other Actants’ actions; they are in the heat of ungovernable passions. All Actants either evoke or seek a passion.Suzanne claims that her desire to renounce her vows is not motivated by an enlightened self-interest, neither by a secret illegal passion; however, the analysis of the text shows that Suzanne’s action is mainly evoked by a specific passion: the anger.Suzanne is not only a Subject, but also an Object toward which the Superiors are directed and with which they try to create a close and intense relationship. Yet the relationship between the Superiors and Suzanne is perverted, and consequently doomed to failure. The wrong-headed objective of the Superiors to acquire Suzanne is patently mistaken and it leads, inevitably, to a fatal issue.

The aim of this paper is to show the analogy that David Hume (1711 - 1776) makes between moral action and the mechanical movement as a clear indication of his understanding of the relationship between reason (direction) and passions (force) in human conduct. Stretching from Hume's moral epistemology to his social theory, the notion that carries this analogy would serve to endorse the view that the Scottish philosopher was trying to become a sort of "Newton of the moral sciences." This meant thinking about moral philosophy within the limits of nature and allowing an independent research, especially in relation to the religious tradition. Hume´s philosophy could be also a performative image of the movement, while an inseparable composition made of the impulse of the contents of sentimental trend, according to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and the direction of the empirical methods come from Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

This paper is a semiotics analysis of literary text, according to the semiotics of the passions, to study of the states of soul of the character. The methodology aimed to semiotic analysis of intersubjective relations between objects of value and the pathways of subjects, controversial structured by the pathways of the anti-subject, to describe the values underlying the discursive processes.

Las reflexiones nietzscheanas sobre la razón y la sensibilidad como grandes fuerzas en tensión, la sensibilidad como liberadora de la existencia y la embriaguez cómo estado creativo por excelencia se presentan en este artículo mostrando como interpretar es un acto vital; así como lo es el crear para Nietzsche. De esta manera, un investigador gana una posición en el mundo y trasciende en la medida en que no solo se comprende a sí mismo, ni a una obra aislada y particular, sino al hombre en general. La creencia en el poder del hombre y la naturaleza: la unión de estas fuerzas para sentir la vida y mostrar lo bello del ser humano así como sus contradicciones, es el poder que la estética nietzscheana da al hombre frente a los ideales que lo alejan de la vida misma y no le permiten la posesión de la tierra. Es la liberación de todos los instintos para acabar con los ideales de la religión que es nociva para la vida. Aspecto enunciado ya por Habermas, en las formas de existir, de sujetos diferentes, que expresan una respuesta estéticamente fundada a la pregunta por la existencia.Nietzsche builds up a reflection about reason and senses as strong forces on tension. Where the senses release human existence and drunkenness is the creative state for excellence. In this paper are shown the reflection and the interpretation acts, as a vital phenomenon created by Nietzsche himself. For this reason, an interpreter reaches a position in the world and transcends when there is not just an understanding of him or herself, of an art work, but also an interpretation of the human being in general. There is a believe on the power of man and nature, their union in order to life, that can show the beauty, the ugliness, and the contradictions of human being; this power is given to mankind on Nietzsche’s special way of seeing art, and goes in the opposite way than ideas does; since they move men further away from life itself. Nietzsche faces religion hatred with senses release. This aspect is included in the question about existence in Habermas works as well.

This paper contrasts Frankfurt’s characterisation of self-love as disinterested with the predominant 18th-century view on self-love as interested. Ttwo senses of the term ‘interest’ are distinguished to discuss two fundamentally different readings of the claim that self-love promotes the agent’s interest. This allows characterising two approaches to self-love, which are found in Hutcheson’s and in Bbutler’s writings. Hutcheson sees self-love as a source of hedonistic motives, which can be calm or passionate. Bbutler sees it as a general affection of rational beings in the sense of a kind of love of one’s real nature.

I want address two main issues in this paper: (i) how did Aristotle get at his definition of anger in Book II of Rhetoric, and (ii) why does anger play the role of paradigm for every investigation on passions? Before sketching out an answer to both questions, I examine the definitions of anger in different contexts: in the De anima, in the Ethics, in the Topics, and in the Rhetoric as well.